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did not unweave by night, and therefore by implication hardly ever wove by day, we’ve known ever since we learned, not what love is, but what reporting is and what public figures are, and how much more than we were ever taught to expect is really lies.
    What I wish I had not lost is the photograph of him, the only nice one. What I wish I had not lost is the ticket for my raincoat at the shoe repair shop. What I wish I had not lost is the suitcase with the letters. What I wish I had not lost is the time, or the inventory of the lost things, or the consciousness of all the things that are not lost. But nothing I had, I think, is anything Jake’s wife wants or ever wanted. Nothing was lost, I think, by any of us there.
    What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.
    Let me just mention people’s expression when they are bored by a confidence, or when their minds are elsewhere, or when they have been told it once already. Let me mention, too, a confidence of long ago, an intimacy, completely, as it turns, out, misunderstood.
    A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine’s limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way, until it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever, and yet never quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene—a bullet, a heart attack, a loss of interest, a cry from shore that dinner’s ready, or company has come, or junior’s run away—the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent.
    What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked, late one afternoon in those years. We were well educated, certainly. We had read widely. And there was no “we,” of course, except in retrospect, since it’s just an I, alone, who reads. We had, all the same, failures of information. The books which determined to such a large extent what we would become were, well, sure, Beatrix Potter, Little Women , Dickens, war and frontier novels, Albert Payson Terhune dog books, Kipling; then, suddenly, poetry, great classics, any or all of them, Dostoevski, Conrad, Melville. With a transcendent, though far from complete comprehension. Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald; then lastly, oddly, in some ways pre-eminently, John O’Hara. How could he have known that? He could not possibly have known it. For some, at an impressionable age, Ayn Rand. Also, inevitably, mountains of trash. The Amboy Dukes , for instance, forbidden in all schools and read by everybody. Forget it. Don’t think about it. There were the other interdicted books, God’s Little Acre , even Sanctuary ; but we didn’t understand them. We may have read and reread, with curiosity, D.H. Lawrence. But if we were, in the end, as young adults and in sexual matters, anybody’s creatures, we were also, though we would never have mentioned it to one another, John O’Hara’s. Highly educated. Even original or finely tuned. But his creatures all the same.
    That year, finally, in those years, we knew it was absurd. We had been adamant about how our lives would be, not like the stereotype daughters of left-wing urban parents, not like the fallen woman in all of letters, not even like the adulterous women in O’Hara. So few of us anyway were married, as his women seemed to be. But, apart from everything else, we were beginning to sense in ourselves the creation, if not of another stereotype, at least of another predictable pattern. Unmarried. Waiting. Studiously cooking